For what was Danton’s plan? He put into his new task the ability, the ruse, the suppleness that he had only lost for a moment in the summer. First, Hébert and the “enragés” must go—they were the vilest form of the spirit that he perceived to be destroying the Republic. Then the Committee must be very gradually weakened. In that task he hoped, vainly enough, to make Robespierre his ally. And finally, the end of all his scheme was the cessation of the Terror. He had created a dictatorship for a specific purpose; that purpose was attained. Wattignies had been won, Lyons captured; soon La Vendée was to be destroyed, and even Toulon to fall. It was intolerable that a system abnormal and extreme, designed to save the State, should be continued for the profit of a few theorists or of a few madmen. How much had not his engine already done?—this machine which, to the horror of its creator, had found a life of its own! It had killed the Queen after a shocking trial; it had alienated what was left of European sympathy; it had struck the Girondins, and Danton was haunted by the inspired voice of Vergniaud singing the “Marseillaise” upon the scaffold; it had run to massacre in the provinces. He feared (and later his fears proved true at Nantes) that September might be repeated with the added horror of legal forms. The Terror finally had reopened the question that of all others might most easily destroy the State. A handful of men had pretended to uproot Catholicism for ever, and what Danton cursed as the “Masque Anti-Religieuse” had defiled Notre Dame. This flood he was determined to turn back into the channels of reason; he was going, without government or police or system, merely by his voice and his ability, to realise the Revolution, to end the dictatorship, and to begin the era of prosperity and of content.